Exactly this. The experience is being degraded by Apple deliberately because it is in their own business interests to do so. They know what they're doing. To hell with us consumers who spend thousands of $€£ with them.
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'Green Bubbles and Blue Bubbles Want to Be Together' Says Samsung Ad Pushing Apple to Adopt RCS
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? In the US, WhatsApp and FB Messenger are “winning”. And iMessage is the gold standard that others should follow, if anything WhatsApp is outdated. There’s a reason everyone is trying to catch up to it, RCS and WhatsApp included.
RCS is not SMS. SMS can not be upgraded. SMS exists on the paging line that keeps your phone connected to the tower it is on. There’s a whopping 140 bytes remaining on that paging line, and SMS allows for you to send 160 7-bit characters on each ping, consuming every remaining byte. RCS does not, will never, fit into that. It’s an OTT messaging service, like all the others. If you have RCS with no data connection, it sends an SMS.
I guess that tracks. The company that, by all regards, still doesn’t seem to value messaging all that highly* (and doesn’t seem to care as much about user experience) would deliver a technically deficient chat experience, wouldn’t they?
* I read an article yesterday about Google’s messaging failures that contrasted it with iMessage, Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp, and Salesforce’s purchase of Slack, particularly noting how Apple considered messaging a tent pole feature and how Facebook and Salesforce were willing to spend billions of dollars to buy existing messaging services, it’s clear that messaging just isn’t an all hands on deck priority for Google. A better way of putting it might be that Google’s corporate culture is like wrangling cats, it’s almost impossible to get everyone to work towards a cohesive common vision,
The more they drag out this desperate ad campaign, the more I want Apple to never ever adopt RCS lol. It's getting pretty pathetic and funny at this point.
I wouldn’t say that the experience is being degraded by Apple. If anything, Apple does go to some measures to make stock MMS/SMS suck less. For one, large texts present as one text instead of being broken apart into multiple parts because they went over the character limit. Any suckiness in the MMS/SMS experience on iPhones is an inherent limitation of MMS/SMS. And base RCS would do little to address those points of suckiness, and apparently Google Messenger still fails to deliver anything that works as well on a technical and user experience level as iMessage (or even WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and the like). One gets the impression that the reason Google adopted RCS (other than to justify the Jibe purchase) was so they could have an ostensibly open standard to use as a cudgel against Apple, particularly in potential legal battles. (Mind you, the EU is the most likely to accept those kinds of standards based arguments, but iMessage has very little marketshare in Europe, and Europe also has a very strong anti-Google bias. So if Google were betting on the EU taking up this fight for them, they probably made a poor bet.)
RCS wasn’t really a thing at all prior to 2015, when Google decided to buy Jibe. And RCS wasn’t really a thing within Google until 2019. And base RCS is lacking in features that we consider de rigeur today, because it’s a 2008 standard. Basically, it’s a standard that predates the smartphone boom, so the base RCS experience is only marginally better than MMS (somewhat better support for group chats than MMS, somewhat better media codexes). There have been updates that have added more features, but it still lags behind most chat platforms today (especially with regards to support of non-phone and SIM-less devices*, even in Google Messages). And the only real implementation of RCS anymore is Google’s Jibe service, with the Google Messages feature built on top of RCS using an over-the-top approach.
* Despite having a robust account system, Google’s been doing a lot of this using a phone number as an identifier business as part of their next billion users initiatives (particularly in India, since they’re banned in China). See Allo and the new Google Pay. Works well in the developing world, not so much in the developed world.
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I suppose that’s true enough, but it certainly also applies to MMS. MMS certainly isn’t using a 160 byte channel, yet we do lump it in with SMS. By that metric, yeah, RCS would technically be OTT, as well. But presumably there’s some special allowances for MMS in terms of cellular bandwidth that would also exist for RCS had the carriers managed to nail the landing and not fumble the whole thing and let Google control their whole RCS stack (and add OTT features on top of RCS).
Google just uses universal profile and it isn't proprietary. You folks just never actually learn about things so you? The only reason Google's Jibe service is used is because it makes it much easier to spin up instances of RCS to use.
The platform is interoperable with third party things and is open largely. RCS is meant to be a replacement for SMS and Google has nothing at all to do with it's design as it is handled by the GSMA.
Nope, alas. Wikipedia notes that Safari/WebKit never supported the blink element, which means that Blink (despite the name) never supported it unless it was added as a deliberate joke, and I have no evidence they ever did.
Usual Samsung hypocrisy. Nothing to see here folks. Noting is stopping them from writing messaging apps that interface with iMessage. Other companies can do it. Oh but it is more fun to pretend it is an issue. Other examples:
Everyone wants a foldable phone that cracks
Oh look, we have lots of teeny tiny pixels in our cameras. Oh, wait the photography experts say they are actually not quite as good as iPhone cameras. What, what?
Our Exynos chips are just as good as apple silicon. What, they are not even as good as Qualcomm, who knew? (Ok, that is not fair, there is nothing wrong with Qualcomm SOCs - still a little slower than AS, but not by enough to matter)
Everyone wants a foldable phone that cracks
Oh look, we have lots of teeny tiny pixels in our cameras. Oh, wait the photography experts say they are actually not quite as good as iPhone cameras. What, what?
Our Exynos chips are just as good as apple silicon. What, they are not even as good as Qualcomm, who knew? (Ok, that is not fair, there is nothing wrong with Qualcomm SOCs - still a little slower than AS, but not by enough to matter)
No, Google Messages adds features like encryption on top of RCS that aren’t part of the Universal Profile. This is a well established fact. In use, Google Messages is not Universal Profile RCS, and so, many of the features people want from an SMS/MMS replacement aren’t available from RCS. Google’s ability to add such features to RCS seems to be because it controls the telcom infrastructure for RCS (via Jibe) and the most popular implementing application.
To be honest, this tendency to gloss over the difference between the feature sets of Jibe and Messages seems disingenuous. The feature people want more than anything, encryption, isn’t available via Jibe and likely cannot be implemented via a carrier based model.
How is a green message button a bad experience? and who cares? If you want android and your friends are on Android, this literally has no meaning for you
Furthermore, I trust Amazon and Meta more than I trust Google, and that’s saying something. I don’t want unencrypted texts going through Google infrastructure. So Jibe is a non-starter for me because of its corporate owner.
Truthfully, group MMS works well enough for me. Granted, I mostly use it for chatting with my family, and we generally don’t use it for video or detailed photos*, and I don’t typically use it for very large groups. The one annoyance is adding or removing people, which was an issue until my youngest brother finally got proper phone service (Google Fi’s implementation of MMS caused some issues with group chat, actually it’s possible that Google Fi doesn’t actually implement MMS and only supports SMS). It did mean that we had to start a new conversation chain, alas. But we’re not adding and removing numbers frequently, so that’s usually not a problem. Chat reactions could work better via MMS, though they’re tolerable as is, and it would take both Apple and Google to support the others’ implementation of chat reactions via MMS.
* When one of us wants to share an image or video, often we want to share it with our mom who doesn’t have a smartphone but does have Facebook Messenger (and iMessage, since she has an iPad, though it would probably be difficult to get her to make the switch over to iMessage even if we all had iPhones). Now obviously, lacking a cell phone number, Google Messages/RCS is a complete non-starter for her.
You can “well, technically!” about this all day, but in the end the result is the same. All messages sent from a hypothetical RCS equipped iPhone to an android of any variety would go through a Google server. Clearly nobody on that side of the pond cares about making their own servers.
Yes let's just stick with an outdated and unsecure communication protocol based on your unproved assumption that Google scans all its messaging platforms. Maybe you should look at the definition of end-to-end encryption (I'll give you a hint, SMS doesn't support E2EE).
Did you ever try to manage a group with at least one green bubble friend? Or tried to send high quality pictures? Or maybe you just want your green bubbles to have end-to-end encryption? SMS is terrible, and iPhone users have to deal with that constantly (maybe not in the US, but shockingly, there are other people on this planet). It's as bad of an experience for Apple users than it is for Android users. So to your question, I care, even if I have no intention to move to Android
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Makes you wonder if this would actually be an issue if Google didn’t intend to scrape all texts going through its service for the purposes of training LLM chat bots.
It’s not a Google standard per se, but it’s as much a Google standard as HTML was a Microsoft standard during the bad old days of IE6 (or as it is today in terms of email HTML and Outlook). All the telecoms have outsourced their implementations to Google, so it controls the infrastructure, and it controls the most popular RCS aware platform/app. In practice, it’s Google driving the standard.